Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Whether Beijing’s formula of mixed capitalism and state control of key enterprises will prove to be durable over the long run has yet to be seen. What we do know, however, is that a few more years of surging energy consumption will soon be playing havoc with energy prices around the world.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Deepwater Horizon
For more than 100 years the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will be immense and lasting damage to the land and to the people. Much of the damage to the land and the streams, and to water quality downstream, will be irreparable within historical time. The lastingness of the damage to the people will, to a considerable extent, be determined by the people.
I’ve been musing on the interaction between a) an extended period of economic stagnation/contraction due to deleveraging, and b) peak oil.
-The Impending Peak and Decline of Petroleum Production: an Underestimated Challenge for Conservation of Ecological Integrity
-How Much Does a Gallon of Gas Cost?
-Offshore Oil Drilling and Hurricane Risks
-BP’s Tony Hayward ‘set to step down’
An amazing thing has happened. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China has now surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest energy consumer.
Canada seems to be heading into authoritarianism and corruption which is similar to conditions in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in which extractive industries are leading centres of national cash flow, which props up industry and state regimes. (Some people describe those international trends as a “resource curse.”) Lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, and oil subsidies are three of the sides of Canada’s petro-regime.
Models of transition in eastern Kentucky must simultaneously address a host of interrelated regional challenges in order to bring sustainable success. The region’s economy is under-developed, with extremely high poverty and unemployment rates; housing stock is inadequate and energy-inefficient; and rural electric cooperatives are more than 90 percent dependent on coal, increasing the vulnerability of their customers in the face of rising prices.
Fossil fuels are currently an essential component in the global economy and the growth of the human population. The fossil fuel production projections from this study suggest that many of the IPCC fossil fuel projections appear overly optimistic. Based on the assumed URR values, it is predicted that global fossil fuel production will peak before 2030. For this reason, it is imperative that appropriate action be taken as early as possible to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel decline, to avoid energy shortages in the near future.
-Andrew Nikiforuk Is Tyee’s First Writer in Residence
-Unist’ot’en leadership takes to the streets to assert their rights and stop the Enbridge pipeline
-Powering up Canadian prosperity
Export of natural gas from Russia to the EU is decisive for the EU’s energy security and a decisive link for the future is the gas pipeline North Stream that will be laid along the bed of the Baltic Sea from a landfall in Vyborg outside St Petersburg to Lybmin in Germany. The pipeline is 1,200,000 meters long and its diameter is 1.2 meters. Using that information I estimate that every pipe segment is 10 meters long. That means that they will weld together 120,000 segments.
Naresh Giangrande is the co-founder of the world’s first Transition Town, in Totnes, UK. The goal of Transition Towns is to transition from oil dependence to community resilience. He was visiting in Vermont last week, and we’ll here what he had to say about how the project is going back in England, plus what he’s learned from other Transition Towns around the world.
